Now standing like a city landmark, SpaceX’s 47-metre-tall has been placed at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and very visible from near-by roads and freeways.

The rocket was the very first that SpaceX successfully landed after launch. The actual launch took place in December last year and carried 11 small Orbcomm communications satellites.

The Falcon 9 (and billionaire founder Elon Musk’s ‘Falcon’ rockets are so named in homage to the Star Wars Millennium Falcon spaceship)

Musk’s team is expected to re-use another of its landed rockets later this year, and one of the candidates for launch is an SES communications satellite. That specific ‘pre-flown’ rocket is likely to be one that landed in April, and has since been refurbished.

The next scheduled launch of a Falcon 9 is slated for September 3-4 and will be Spacecom of Israel’s AMOS-6 satellite.

Categories: Articles, DTH/Satellite